Posts I've Made

- The strong blue light is up to you, depending on the type of film you’re shooting (so I guess such a blue might fit well in a sci-fi scene for instance), also if the scene requires the actor to open the door, would that blue light all come out, in that case overpowering the practical you placed above the door?

- What’s inside the door?

1. If that’s a sort of back entrance of a pub you can set up something like an LED emergency light? On the other hand if that's the main entrance of a pub you could place a red sign or something: this way you could really play with colors and contrast.

2. You could just hung a bare bulb with a shabby rain protection, that would fit that kind of place (just experiment with different sizes, types and colors)?

- Don’t use any practical and you can give the main actor a torch to play with it.

- I personally feel that this big street light off screen left (the existing lighting in the street) is somehow killing a little bit of contrast in the foreground, as if the wall is flatter than what you want it to be. And if you really want that practical above the door be the key light maybe you can diminish the intensity of that big source: if you can’t move it, you can wrap it with some NDs or kill it completely with a huge flag and replace it with a smaller fixture that would fill up a bit in case it'd be too dark. I guess the darker the alley the more powerful would be that practical you put above the door.

Can’t really say much with just a picture and knowing nothing about the story and the type of film you’re shooting, but I hope this can help you out and inspiring you at shaping your ideas and solutions on the matter

If I were you, I’d try not to use much lighting, as they could create problems with multiples shadows, and you are using two cameras, so you might have some space problem? I’d keep it really simple, using a naturalistic approach (and you save on the budget, especially if you're thinking of renting an HMI, which may be quite expensive)

Depending on the look you want to go for, it seems to me by looking to the attached pic of the location that this has the right part of the diner, where the two subjects wii be sitting, which is sort of hidden from the direct sunglight of the windows, because of the closed door, and the bluish daylight coming in blend with the warmer top practicals of the diners.

- You could place an HMI outside the window, you could bounced on the left wall where the paintings are, so it doesn’t come direct on the two subjects. And this gives the ambience, you could slightly overexpose these windows.

- Maybe then you use soft (so not to cast ugly shadows on the eyes, unless that’s wanted) light faking the warmer top practicals, if you can rig any, or just shape the practicals with black fabric if you want it to just hit the table and not for instance all the wall behind the actor.

- Or if you think you don’t want to blend in a warmer color, just keep the window as the main natural source and work with a few black fabrics to create contrast on the actors’ faces in the close-ups. Just slightly filling in if necessary: as you don’t see the windows in the close-ups you could(and you won’t see the windows you’re free to place a light closer to the subjects, as it it comes from the window itself).

I don’t know.. I’m just giving you some tips from the little I can do, hopefully will motivate and inspire you to find the best approach for lighting your scene

Personally, the cheapest option, which would give you the best in quality of footage is probably the Blackmagic Pocket camera: it allows you to shoot RAW, Pro Res,10bit,…, sure you’d learn so much in term of color grading, you could pair the camera with a metabones speedboster to reduce the 16mm crop factor and gain 1 stop. (It doesn’t have slow motion though, and it doens’t record more than 1080p). I think the Blackmagic micro cinema actually records slow motion, and it has all the features than the pocket has.

If you searching for something to shoot slow motion with (good camera also for photography), I personally really like the Sony a6500 (yet it records 8bit 4:2:0), and it's cheaper than the A7s II.

I haven’t tried the GH5, but never really liked the GH4. I don’t know, there’s something about that camera which I never really liked (even if people keep saying it’s got lots of better features than the sony a6500), but again this is just personal taste.

Sony FS7 is great, but way more expensive. As Robin said, you could find a used one, which could be quit cheaper!